Jonathan Bate, writing in Romantic Ecology notes that poets were as much geographers as historians. Thinking about this in relation to this project then its subject matter - taking a single road and following it through England in order to treat the mundane as exotic, - does seem primarily geographic in intention. The problem is, I know nothing about geography whatsoever. The multi-disciplinary nature of the MA presents challenges in this respect. It is difficult to break down subject barriers or indulge in the academic equivalent of fusion cooking if you are ignorant of what the theory is in the first place. It's here that books like the Handbook of Cultural Geography are invaluable. The opening chapter's 'Rough Guide' seeks to give an overview of where the main recent developments have been, couched in language that is not too jargon laden, and so enables someone new to the subject to grasp its main thrust. This is followed up by more detailed essays, written in more specialised language that give you an opportunity to get 'stuck-in' to the nitty gritty of contemporary discourse in cultural geography, if you so desire.
After asserting that the diversity of Cultural Geography makes delineating its boundaries difficult the editors do attempt to posit a broad definition:
Cultural Geography is a style of thought which involves an injunction to think spatially about the world.
The editors go on to say, "cultural geography is better though of as a series of intellectual - and, at the core, politicised engagements with the world. (p. 2)
The 'Rough Guide' is divided into five themes - it seems useful to make a few notes on each of them.
1. Culture as distribution of things.
All groups of people produce cultural artefacts, from every the everyday items around the house to larger artefacts such as buildings and roads. What can the pattern of material artefacts tell us about the social, economic and political dynamics of cultures? These concerns are central to cultural geography.
Taking housing as an example it can be analysed from a number of standpoints:
Cultural geographies of artefacts, then, are as much about the graffiti themselves as they are about the the locations of the graffiti-marked building; as much about home as they are about housing; and as much about the diversity within culture as they are about culture per se. These geographies ask why and how as much as where and when.
2. Culture as way of life (p. 4)
"The values, beliefs languages, meanings and practices that make up people's 'ways of life', however mobile and mutable, have been the stock-in-trade of cultural geography for close on a century." The scope of enquiry has diversified during this period. Originally focused on 'exotic livelihoods of 'other' non-western groups, increasingly the subject homed in on more familiar territories which developed in tandem with poststructuralist critiques of knowledge in human geography.
3. Culture as meaning (pp. 4-5)
Landscapes, city streets, monuments, all are imbued with cultural meaning which shifts, is debated, asserted or denied over time. In cultural geography how are these meanings constructed, by whom and for what purpose? What do we mean by meaning - individual emotions, experiences and memories; or group values, communal attachments or national ideals?
Finding appropriate analytical tools to investigate such matters has proved vexing - resulting in a range of approaches:
1. Culture as distribution of things.
All groups of people produce cultural artefacts, from every the everyday items around the house to larger artefacts such as buildings and roads. What can the pattern of material artefacts tell us about the social, economic and political dynamics of cultures? These concerns are central to cultural geography.
Taking housing as an example it can be analysed from a number of standpoints:
- The style and decor can reveal the economic class of the resident, their ethnicity, attitudes to nature, their sense of belonging to a particular community.
- The interior can suggest gendered relationships within the family, social and economic aspirations, and work patterns.
- Neighbourhoods may reveal societal structures rather than individual identity.
Cultural geographies of artefacts, then, are as much about the graffiti themselves as they are about the the locations of the graffiti-marked building; as much about home as they are about housing; and as much about the diversity within culture as they are about culture per se. These geographies ask why and how as much as where and when.
2. Culture as way of life (p. 4)
"The values, beliefs languages, meanings and practices that make up people's 'ways of life', however mobile and mutable, have been the stock-in-trade of cultural geography for close on a century." The scope of enquiry has diversified during this period. Originally focused on 'exotic livelihoods of 'other' non-western groups, increasingly the subject homed in on more familiar territories which developed in tandem with poststructuralist critiques of knowledge in human geography.
3. Culture as meaning (pp. 4-5)
Landscapes, city streets, monuments, all are imbued with cultural meaning which shifts, is debated, asserted or denied over time. In cultural geography how are these meanings constructed, by whom and for what purpose? What do we mean by meaning - individual emotions, experiences and memories; or group values, communal attachments or national ideals?
Finding appropriate analytical tools to investigate such matters has proved vexing - resulting in a range of approaches:
- Textual - adapting methods from literary criticism to read the landscape as text, and with it the potential for a deconstructive interpretation.
- Iconographic - adapted from art history in order to interpret landscape as a visual image.
These approaches have been criticised as being to discursive and ignoring the material conditions of landscape production and thereby erasing the meanings of its producers.
Other cultural geographers have called for studies which focus on the non-material aspects of language and focus on people's intimate experience and performance within it.
4. Culture as doing (p. 5)
This idea that culture is 'done' is derived from Marxism's notion that consciousness is practical. Drawing on Epicurean ideas of 'the swerve of the atom' Marx asserted matter as a kind of of vitalising property. However this position contains a central ambiguity which has never quite been resolved. In placing 'recaltricance and vitality. within the sphere of human consciousness, Marx played down the agency within nature. Later debates have developed the idea of the swerve of the atom as a metaphor for man's capacity to resist (and shape?) physical form. Critics of this view challenge this division between nature and culture and see agency as something distributed across all kinds of hybrid actors.
"Such cultural geography tends to be hyperactive, sought up especially in forms of life which refuse the directive cultural politics so beloved by academics for a quicksilver cultural politics that is not only more tenuous but also in its emphasis on mobility of circumstance, more alert to differences and so more able to follow some of those paths to freedom".
It involves analysing cultural activity through certain kinds of virtualism, through notions such as habitus, 'actor network' and immanent 'becoming' to produce new modes of thinking that harry space, then re-invent it.
5. Culture as power
In some senses the analysis of power is implicit in all four of the foregoing themes:
"Over time, understandings of power have shifted away from models based on the power of one group over another, towards those involving the power to do things. This has suggested that power relations consist not only of domination, but also of seduction, influence, persuasion, capacity, ability, manipulation, consent, compromise, subversion, control and so on". (p. 6)
Analysis of power relations based on class have been supplemented (or weakened?) by those centred on politics, gender, lifestyle, nature, race, sexuality, nationality and so on.
The problem remains how to understand the ways space, place and nature are implicated - and constitutive - of unjust, unequal and uneven poer relations, and how to suggest ways of addressing and redressing these relations.
Thinking Spatially About Culture, Thinking Culturally About Space.
1. Building Bloc Approach.
Attempts to identify large processes to provide large scale explanations - for example Harvey's work on 'time/space compression'. Here, a transmission mechanism by which 'economy' could be linked to 'culture', so allowing traffic to take place between the two blocs. Space then becomes both a central engine of change in the nature of capitalism and its expression. (p. 6)
The blunt dualism of such explanation is now looked at askance, as it forces 'pared down narrative structures' on the geography of history and provides the illusion of control in a perplexing world, which is exactly the opposite of what 'spatial conciousness' should achieve.
2.Spaces of Identity.
Here the idea of fixed identity unambiguously belonging to one group and fixed in a particular place has been replaced by more fluid identity that can be combined in different ways. This emphasis on hybridity was best expressed in the highly influential work of Gilroy (1993). It is no surprise that an emphasis on mobility and hybridity have become key tropes in recent works on identity.
3. 'Scapes'
Related to the above is recent work on spatial surfaces - in the beginning concerned with landscapes and the structured act of seeing the land incarnated into particular 'scapes' but later branching out to encompass sound and more latterly music and not just landscapes, but city and even 'earthscapes'. In part it can be part of a grander attempt to ground in new ways ans so give the earth voice. 'Our houses are tumili erected over the slaughtered body of the giant ground; only our nervous decorations, our attention to monumental detail. or preoccupation with property, gives us away.' Carter 1996, 2).
Carter, P. (1996) The lie of the Land, Faber and Faber
Cosgrove, D, Apollo's Eye, Baltimore: John Hopkins University
4. Dwelling (pp.. 7-8)
Originally an approach associated with phenomenology concerning the human experience of place which traded heavily on notions of 'authenticity' in nature and culture, more recently has been influenced by the sociology of science, actor network and non-representational theory to investigate how non-human agency can effect space - resulting in an 'inhuman' thinking about place. Latour (1999) postulated a politics of co-existence. Whatmore and Thorne (1998) map out how animals were drawn into various projects which circulated them around the world. They sought a new 'natural contract' in which 'habitus', the 'unconcious' and other such sedimentations can be dreamt in more active ways.
5. Experimental
This kind of thinking attempts to culture a delight in the intricacies of space as a way of finding new interconnections through which new kinds of humanity can be realised. The increasing appeal to performance as a guiding metaphor goes hand in hand with attempts to produce new visions of place or more accurately 'space-time' to defy conventional cognitive co-ordinates, to unlock something different, something that exceeds - that engages the power of virtuality with its attachment to life. This is what Bennett calls 'ethical energetics', which can produce new stances to the world, 'fundementally more capricious. generous and "unthreatened" becomings of the self' (2001) So against a weak ontology. a new kind of spacial ethics is being forged. There is all to play for.
Bennett, J. (2001) The Enchantment of Modern Life, Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
"Such cultural geography tends to be hyperactive, sought up especially in forms of life which refuse the directive cultural politics so beloved by academics for a quicksilver cultural politics that is not only more tenuous but also in its emphasis on mobility of circumstance, more alert to differences and so more able to follow some of those paths to freedom".
It involves analysing cultural activity through certain kinds of virtualism, through notions such as habitus, 'actor network' and immanent 'becoming' to produce new modes of thinking that harry space, then re-invent it.
5. Culture as power
In some senses the analysis of power is implicit in all four of the foregoing themes:
"Over time, understandings of power have shifted away from models based on the power of one group over another, towards those involving the power to do things. This has suggested that power relations consist not only of domination, but also of seduction, influence, persuasion, capacity, ability, manipulation, consent, compromise, subversion, control and so on". (p. 6)
Analysis of power relations based on class have been supplemented (or weakened?) by those centred on politics, gender, lifestyle, nature, race, sexuality, nationality and so on.
The problem remains how to understand the ways space, place and nature are implicated - and constitutive - of unjust, unequal and uneven poer relations, and how to suggest ways of addressing and redressing these relations.
Thinking Spatially About Culture, Thinking Culturally About Space.
1. Building Bloc Approach.
Attempts to identify large processes to provide large scale explanations - for example Harvey's work on 'time/space compression'. Here, a transmission mechanism by which 'economy' could be linked to 'culture', so allowing traffic to take place between the two blocs. Space then becomes both a central engine of change in the nature of capitalism and its expression. (p. 6)
The blunt dualism of such explanation is now looked at askance, as it forces 'pared down narrative structures' on the geography of history and provides the illusion of control in a perplexing world, which is exactly the opposite of what 'spatial conciousness' should achieve.
2.Spaces of Identity.
Here the idea of fixed identity unambiguously belonging to one group and fixed in a particular place has been replaced by more fluid identity that can be combined in different ways. This emphasis on hybridity was best expressed in the highly influential work of Gilroy (1993). It is no surprise that an emphasis on mobility and hybridity have become key tropes in recent works on identity.
3. 'Scapes'
Related to the above is recent work on spatial surfaces - in the beginning concerned with landscapes and the structured act of seeing the land incarnated into particular 'scapes' but later branching out to encompass sound and more latterly music and not just landscapes, but city and even 'earthscapes'. In part it can be part of a grander attempt to ground in new ways ans so give the earth voice. 'Our houses are tumili erected over the slaughtered body of the giant ground; only our nervous decorations, our attention to monumental detail. or preoccupation with property, gives us away.' Carter 1996, 2).
Carter, P. (1996) The lie of the Land, Faber and Faber
Cosgrove, D, Apollo's Eye, Baltimore: John Hopkins University
4. Dwelling (pp.. 7-8)
Originally an approach associated with phenomenology concerning the human experience of place which traded heavily on notions of 'authenticity' in nature and culture, more recently has been influenced by the sociology of science, actor network and non-representational theory to investigate how non-human agency can effect space - resulting in an 'inhuman' thinking about place. Latour (1999) postulated a politics of co-existence. Whatmore and Thorne (1998) map out how animals were drawn into various projects which circulated them around the world. They sought a new 'natural contract' in which 'habitus', the 'unconcious' and other such sedimentations can be dreamt in more active ways.
5. Experimental
This kind of thinking attempts to culture a delight in the intricacies of space as a way of finding new interconnections through which new kinds of humanity can be realised. The increasing appeal to performance as a guiding metaphor goes hand in hand with attempts to produce new visions of place or more accurately 'space-time' to defy conventional cognitive co-ordinates, to unlock something different, something that exceeds - that engages the power of virtuality with its attachment to life. This is what Bennett calls 'ethical energetics', which can produce new stances to the world, 'fundementally more capricious. generous and "unthreatened" becomings of the self' (2001) So against a weak ontology. a new kind of spacial ethics is being forged. There is all to play for.
Bennett, J. (2001) The Enchantment of Modern Life, Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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